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Henry Kissinger died today. I knew he was a popular punching bag for the left, but seeing the barrage of over-the-top reactions gives me the feeling that I’m missing something. My impression is that Kissinger was a brilliant diplomat who laid the foundation for total American victory in the Cold War. Even if you’re a bleeding-heart internationalist who thinks he’s bad for killing foreigners in Indochina, his role in normalizing relations with China probably saved way more Asian lives than he killed. What is the steelman “Kissinger is evil” position? What am I missing?
In addition to what @Skibboleth mentioned below Kissinger was also instrumental in US support for Pinochet's coup against Allende in Chile.
I do not think people's unrelated good and bad acts somehow function to cancel each other out. Maybe if the evil things were in some way necessary to do the good things we can say the things were on net good but I don't think a case could be made that Kissinger's evils were actually necessary to accomplish his good deeds. You don't get, like, one free murder for every life you save. Or every thousand. Or every million. You get no free murders!
The dissolve all government and trust in the inherent goodness of anarchy, because otherwise that's exactly what you get if you accept the legitimacy of policy at scale.
Policy is about choices, including not making choices. People will die as a consequence of not only action, but also no action, and also regardless of action. There is no world where government action at scale doesn't negatively impact many people, there are only worlds where you don't mind the losers because you like the winning more. This is why 'good' and 'evil' policies are judged on more than just the presence of deaths.
This is where individual-level morality of individuals fails to be coherent at scale, because 'acts' and 'deeds' can be individual actions independent of eachother. You can conduct one with no need to conduct the other. But this isn't true at the policy level of not just national, but international level. The good and the bad are not independent of eachother, they are often outputs of the same sort of policies. To pick a mostly benevolently-seen example, the same 'let's save the environment' policies that push for electrical vehicles also drive mass strip mining and enable the geopolitical blackmail shenanigans of the resource-controllers that not only enable, but empower, abuse of people at regional scales. You don't actually have the policy finess to go 'I want the good stuff, but none of the bad,' particularly when inconsistent strategy can deliver worse of both. This is how Responsibility to Protect legal theories that won the public argument about western intervention in Libya led to... open-air slave markets in Libya.
When it comes to Kissinger's career, the evils and the goods both came from the same overarching Cold War policies of communist containment that led to the Soviet Union's defeat in the Cold War. Despite some nostalgic revisionism, there was nothing pre-ordained about the fall of the Soviet Union, or that it would occur in the way it did. The Soviety Union was not, in fact, too poor to keep itself together by force- it lacked the will, not the means, to maintain a nuclear-deterrence repression state. In so much that Kissinger's good deeds entailed the relatively peaceful dismantling of the Soviet Union, so did his bad crimes.
I think that after the mid 70s it was clear. In the early 80s everyone just waited for the regime to die. Probably there were signs during the space race too - but then the smart people were either too pro USSR or too blinded by anti communism to be objective.
This is completely wrong.
The most amusing anecdote to that effect: in 1987 Star Trek TNG's future history included launches from Baikonur Cosmodrome, USSR in 2363; in 1989 another mention established the USSR as still active at least through 2123.
But most of the rest of the recent Twitter thread where I saw that is good too, and a more academic view can be found here.
I keep harping on this lately for some reason, but for a decade and a half the position of "the smart people" was that, as Walter Cronkite put it, “It turned out there had never been a race to the Moon”. It wasn't until 1989 that the very existence of the N1 rocket, including the most powerful rocket stage ever flown until the SpaceX SuperHeavy tests this year, finally leaked.
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